Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives becomes dissolved.[79]
Joseph Campbell
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.The art of the absurd is only art to the absurd... it is what you want it to be and to those that are also absurd...
FrostyJim
Level 8
June 7, 2019
0
Do you really think that such an eminent physicist as Niels Bohr should be classified as absurd?
- Niels Bohr:
- I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
@WilliamFleming - yes
@FrostyJim Whatever. I guess what is absurd to one person is meaningful to another. Perhaps if you studied it further you might learn to grasp meaning or beauty.
@WilliamFleming - Absurdity can be an asset just like humor and sarcasm when trying to present a viewpoint. Einstein was absurd and so was Lenny Bruce...
@FrostyJim I follow you. I don’t think Bohr was trying to be absurd though.
In high school we had to read Poe’s “The Raven”. At the time I thought it was ridiculous. A raven flying in and lighting over the door? “Never more” my ass! Ravens can’t talk.
Recently I heard it read on YouTube and I was affected in a totally different way. There are subconscious stirrings, not readily understood that arise having to do with a young man’s melancholy.
I could undertake to prove the poem false—it would be easy, but that would miss the point of the whole thing. I think that’s what Campbell is talking about in regard to mythology.
why dosent delete work ?
magicwatch
Level 7
June 7, 2019
0
I apologise, tried to delete my response
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